Gelid Tranquillo tested

Index

After attaching the mounting mechanism and applying thermal paste (all the tests were performed with GC extreme thermal paste) we took the next step.

Unfortunately, we didn't like the mounting process one bit. It gets pretty complicated and mounting Tranquillo on Intel's socket is best done by taking the motherboard out of the case, regardless of whether you have mounting holes on your case or not.

The problem is that the screws have to be screwed from the inside of the board while holding the backplate with the other hand. Although the backplate has sticky tape on it, it's not strong enough to hold it and it will often give in to the screws and fall off the board. As you can imagine, this can annoy the heck out of you so we'd advise you to take the motherboard out of the case if you don't have spare hands around.

We sincerely hope that Gelid will remedy this problem in their future models and devise a system similar to the one Cooler Master uses on its cooling solutions that come with backplates. So, a simple "screw and nut" system would've been great – place the screws and simply fasten them with nuts on the opposite side. Such a system would be a simple solution, but those tend to be the best ones and surely would make many a user's day.

After mounting the cooler on the motherboard, we commenced our tests. Our test methods are pretty simple, introduce load on the CPU by using Prime95 until it hits 100%. We measured the temperatures with SpeedFan and CoreTemp applications.

It's important to note that we used Intel's Extreme processors, which requires some serious cooling when overclocking.

We did a couple of scenarios – CPU at 2.93GHz reference speed, the same CPU overclocked to 3.33GHz and two fan speeds – 60% and 100%.

As you can see, when the CPU is at reference clocks, all the cooling solutions run pretty nice and the temperatures are pretty close.

Our final test justifies Tranquillo's name and it ran much quieter than the other two coolers, especially the Hyper TX3 which was pretty noisy when running at 2800 rpm.

Conclusion

We really liked Gelid's Tranquillo as the cooler features great design, excellent finishing and multitude of tiny details that although unnoticeable, do a lot to improve the performance. Tranquillo is also one of few cooling solutions that supports almost all newer processors, including Intel's 1366 and 1156 socket CPUs.

The tests clearly show that Tranquillo's true power is revealed when you decide to overclock your CPU. Of course, when overclocking a CPU the temperatures go up as well, so the system will automatically increase the rpm on Tranquillo's fan. Still, you need not worry about noise, as Tranquillo justified its name and runs surprisingly quiet at maximum rpm.

On the other hand, we were quite disappointed with the complicated mounting process on Intel's sockets. The easiest solution to this seems to be taking your motherboard out of the case. Of course, this is time consuming, but after the mounting process, this cooler will not disappoint. Gelid is a young company and they've done a good job, but we're looking forward to seeing some more practical mounting systems on their future products.

Tranquillo is currently priced at €28, which is pretty nice, especially considering that some coolers in its class feature inferior performance and they're still priced up to €50. Furthermore, Gelid's warranty on this cooler is good for 5 years, which makes this deal altogether sweeter.